Monday, September 24, 2012

"World Health Organisation says has found new SARS-like virus"

Here we go again. I suppose it's time to dust off the Tickerspy Bird flu, Swine flu, SARS stock index.*
From Reuters:

A new virus
belonging to the same family as the SARS virus that killed 800 people in
2002 has been identified in Britain in a man who had recently been in
Saudi Arabia, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Sunday.

The United Nations health body,
which issued a statement through its "global alert and response"
system, said tests on the patient, a 49-year-old Qatari man, confirmed
the presence of a new, or novel, coronavirus.Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses which includes the common cold and SARS.

"Given
that this is a novel coronavirus, WHO is currently in the process of
obtaining further information to determine the public health
implications," the statement said....MORE

Pardon me while I slip my Reynolds Wrap turban on.On April 28th we introduced our readers to the Tickerspy Swine Flu/Bird Flu Index (RXFLU).Although I glanced at the index from time to time I didn't follow it closely.Today,
when I saw a couple of the components get whacked, Novavax (NVAX) down
20.25% on the day and Hemispherx Biopharma (HEB) down 27.20%, I assumed
the index got hit pretty hard.And it was, closing down 9.8%. But what struck me was the action over the last month:

Even though the media frenzy has passed and the public seems blasé, someone has been buying these stocks and buying in enough size to gun the index to be the #1 performer through Thursday, out of 250 indices that Tickerspy tracks. Which leads to the the questions:Who's buying?What do they know?...